Schmidt, Brian Paul

Schmidt, Brian Paul, 1967–, Australian-American astrophysicist, b. Missoula, Mont., Ph.D. Harvard, 1993. He has been associated with Australian National Univ. since 1995. Schmidt and Adam Riess shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Two teams, one led by Schmidt and Riess and the other by Perlmutter, independently used Type Ia supernovas as distance indicators and found that a large number of these stellar explosions were dimmer than expected. This finding demonstrated that the expansion of the universe is speeding up and suggests that the universe is likely infinite in space and time.